Russian Dramatist Mikhail Kuzmin and the Sexual Ambiguity of the Commedia Mask

Abstract

The impact of commedia dell arte on the aesthetic universe of Vsevolod Meierkhol'd has long been recognized; from The Puppet Show to Magnanimous Cuckold and beyond, the imagery and artistic principles associated with commedia became for Meierkhol'd a lodestone. In his productions, the balagan or fairground puppet show would replace the restrictive codes of realism — the clown, the mask, the pratfall were his weapons against the confines of the fourth wall. But Meierkhol'd was far from the only Russian artist fascinated with commedia's mystique. Among its devotees we find dramatist and poet Aleksandr Blok, dramatist and director Nikolai Evreinov, director Aleksandr Tairov, director Sergei Eisenstein, and the dance-drama creators of the Ballets Russes. In the realm of the visual arts, a path leads back to Mir iskusstva (The World of Art), in its devotion to non-idealogical art and the rococo finery of the eighteenth century. For indeed, the Silver Age version of commedia had little to do with the improvisational troupes touring sixteenth-century Italy; rather the Russian artists created an amalgam of Carlo Gozzi's eighteenth-century Italy entwined with the nineteenth-century romanticism of Deburau's moony Pierrot and the grotesque and elegant stories of E.T.A. Hoffman.